Las Vegas After Dark

You can’t go wrong with walking along The Strip by tripod and capturing the neon lights with blurred traffic. There are several great walking bridges that go right over the road and are perfect for this. The bridges are lined with glass, so having something to block reflections is ideal (either just a coat or something more official like a rubber anti-reflection lens hood). This particular shot is a composite of about five images to get traffic from all directions.

If you have seen any photos of The Strip, it is most likely this one. This is a very ‘classic’ view that showcases the main area of The Strip with the fountains and Eiffel Tower. Where do you go for this? Well, you get a room at The Cosmopolitan and try to be around floor 30 to 40. You need to pay specifically for the “Terrace Studio Fountain View”, or you can get even fancier with their wrap-around balcony view. But the Terrace Studio is your cheapest bet for this view. You can chill out like I did through sunset and get a variety of shots as the fountains go off (around every 15 minutes).

I saved the most difficult view of The Strip for last. You have probably heard stories of people getting in trouble for flying a drone over The Strip. The stories are true. They are very strict about flying here. I won’t go into the ENTIRE story of how I got authorized, but I will share the cliffnotes so you know what you are getting into if you want to do this yourself.

For my flight, I opted for a weekday morning before sunrise to have the least amount of traffic. I also only requested a single flight location where I only flew VERTICALLY, not horizontally. I was told having horizontal movement would be a bigger flight concern by the LVMPD, and to do that required police to be on sight with me. I was given pricing for that, and it ended up being a minimum of $700!!! $88hr + 1hr pickup/dropoff per officer for 2 officers for 3 hrs minimum is $88 x 8… SO - If you want to spend that, go for it. Then you can legally fly up/down The Strip (if they approve - which if you picked a busy night they might still reject it). Some of the penalties for flying illegally can include significant fines, up to $250,000, criminal charges, and prison time.

With that in mind, here is the process to be legally authorized. You will need:

1. General Liability Insurance and a custom waiver that lists Clark County and LVMPD
2. Plan over 60 days in advance due to different timelines
3. FAA Drone Authorization of the flight - ideally submitted 75 days in advance
4. A launch location - You either need approval from private property like the Casino’s (good luck), OR you need to find a County Maintained sidewalk like I did.
5. Clark County Special Events Permit, which needs 60 days notice
6. County Film Permit, which needs 15 days notice and a $45 fee

Once all is finalized, you are good to go, that ‘easy’!

ALL of that is to say - I have only done this once due to the headache. But I did get this pretty cool 360 Panorama as well.

Fremont is a great walking street in Downtown Las Vegas as it's filled aggressively with neon lights. Cameras are allowed, however security told us tripods are NOT allowed... if they ‘touch the ground’. Whatever that means? We decided to interpret that to mean if we could put our tripod on something else - we were good. (This was later confirmed by security.) So, we set the tripod up on the tops of dozens of large trashcans. The only reason I liked having a tripod was so I could blur all the people.

While you are at Fremont, you might as well go to the end of the street where they launch fireworks from the Plaza roof. As of the time of writing, they do this every Friday night between May 2 – Sept 26. Again, a tripod is very handy.

An iconic spot that everyone loves to go to for photos. It is located right next to the airport at the far south end of The Strip. My recommendation? Early morning. This was taken just before sunrise, and I had the place ‘nearly’ to myself. But even by sunrise it started to get busy. However, I have seen that it is USUALLY a HUGE line waiting for a photo, so I was very happy with my scenario - especially since I wanted to use a telephoto lens to get this compressed view of the sign with The Strip behind it.

Ok let’s get out in the desert and have some fun! Instead of finding lights, we’ll make our own this time. Seven Magic Mountain is JUST outside the city, and it's a very fun spot to photograph day or night. I have done astrophotography there a few times now. In this image, I combined a milky way photo with a few others where I used lights mounted to my drone to light up the columns. Get creative with it!

Last, we’re going to go somewhere a bit more remote and be fully responsible for our light. This location is just outside the city as well but to the southeast. It is a huge open valley full of cracks and a view of the mountain. I combined a sunset shot with my steel wool to create this image. But just like Seven Magic Mountain - you can get creative with ANY type of light painting you want to mess around with.